The One About Science Writing

(Memo: This was part two in a series of columns on science writing; will post Part One when I can locate it!)
(First published in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, August 2003)

"If science writing is so great as you think,” wrote a correspondent in response to last week’s eulogy to the genre, “why has no science type been given the Literature Nobel?”
The question is meant to be rhetorical; but treat it as genuine, and you begin to raise alarmingly large issues.
Nobel’s Will is brief on the subject of the literature prize. All he wrote in 1895 was that one prize should be reserved for the person who had produced "the most outstanding work in an ideal direction". The statutes of the Nobel Foundation defined literature as "not only belles-lettres, but also other writings which, by virtue of their form and style, possess literary value". The statutes also stipulated that "older works" could be considered "if their significance has not become apparent until recently".
In the 102 years of the Prize, its recipients have included philosophers (Bertrand Russell, for instance), politicians (Winston Churchill), historians (Mommsen was cited specifically for his history of Rome), poets (by the score) and of course, novelists and dramatists. The language of the citations is worth comment. In 1974, the Prize went to Harry Martinson, for “writings that catch the dewdrop and reflect the cosmos”. Churchill was cited, in part, for his “brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values”. Sigrid Undset was cited “principally for her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages”, a year after Henri Bergson received the Prize, bestowed “in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas”. Naipaul was cited not in literary terms, but for “having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories”.
“In recognition of rich and vitalizing ideas”? Then why not a prize for Hofstatder? “Writings that catch the dewdrop and reflect the cosmos?” Could that not describe Roger Penrose’s work as well? And if it’s “incorruptible scrutiny” united with “perceptive narrative” that we want, how about a hosanna for the work of Richard Dawkins? Given the range and breadth of the Swedish Academy’s search for writings which possess literary value, one finds it even more anomalous that they do not include science writing within their grasp.
This is even more puzzling in our time, in the age of ostensible reason, than it would have been in the 1900s—a period when science writing flourished, but did not, perhaps, enjoy the reach and popularity that it does today. Do a random check on Amazon for the five most popular titles in their science category. Number one is Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Everything, which ranks number six overall; at two is Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, which has slipped to 65 overall (a few weeks ago, Schlosser was in the high twenties); third is Steven Strogatz’ Sync, with an overall ranking of 93; fourth is The Golden Ratio: The Story of Pi, much further down but still respectable at a ranking of 234; and fifth is Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, with a ranking of 299, not bad when you consider the book was published in 1999 and is still moving fast off the shelves. The rankings in themselves don’t make an impact—but compared to similar rankings for the Literary Fiction category, guess who comes out ahead each time? Science writing, no question. The genre also outdoes similar offerings in the History and Biography fields time after time, except in weeks when a Hillary Rodham Clinton skews the numbers.
I use Amazon just as an example: in bookshops the world over, the popularity of science writing currently rivals any genre except the popular fiction lot. This can go to absurd lengths—Simon Singh’s The Code Book and Karl Sabbagh’s Riemann Hypothesis are not, strictly speaking, works for the layperson (especially not, added this columnist bitterly, laypersons from a humanities background with inadequate training in mathematics), but glamour hangs around them. They are the new coffee table books.
In his introduction to Galileo’s Commandment: An Anthology of Great Science Writing, Edmund Blair Bolles says, “I love great science writing for the same reason I enjoy splendid autobiography or classic letters and journals. It puts me in direct contact with an active, probing mind… It is the presence of a living imagination that keeps great science writing alive, just as it does other forms of writing, yet the nature of this literary form remains mostly unremarked and unexamined.”
And yet this is a form that brings together minds as diverse, but as richly endowed, as Galileo, as Primo Levi, Julian Huxley, Johannes Kepler, Charles Darwin, Stephen Jay Gould…the list is long, the list is worth our time. Darwin wrote in a pre-Nobel era, or which academic committee could resist his style: “Hence, both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact—that mystery of mysteries—the first appearance of new beings on this earth.” I hear an echo of Darwin when I read Primo Levi on the elements of The Periodic Table, and I hear an echo of all the great storytellers as well: “Instead, I will tell just one more story, the most secret, and I will tell it with the humility and restraint of him who knows from the start that his theme is desperate, his means feeble, and the trade of clothing facts in words is bound by its very nature to fail.”
Over in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy has more important things to consider than its blindness towards a branch of writing that does not belong, officially, to the humanities, but that contains much of philosophy, affects our daily politics and often is literature. For years, the great question occupying the minds of those in the Academy has been whether Alfred Nobel wrote idealisk or idealiserad. It is an important question, since the difference encompasses the yawning gap between “ideal”, or “in an ideal direction”, and “idealised”, which is quite another thing. One might argue, though, that if the Academy can expend so much energy on this linguistic point, it might find it in itself to wonder about the broader meaning of literature, to debate the politics of exclusion.
If this column and the previous one have been far more richly dotted with quotes than usual, blame my zeal to get you to hear the voices of writers who are not normally seen as “literary”, not normally discussed as “mellifluous”, whose philosophies and styles are not debated as fiercely as we debate Naipaul or Dari Fo.
And so I leave you with one final quote, because Jon Franklin says this so much better than I ever will: “If science was ever a thing apart, a special way of living and of seeing things, that time is past. Today, science is the vital principle of our civilization. To do science is critical, to defend it the kernel of political realism. To define it in words is to be, quite simply, a writer, working the historical mainstream of literature.”